Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of the congregation I joyfully serve. But my congregation loves me!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

My Presby Peeps on Health Care

My letter writing peeps are published again! Judy and Jennie will conquer with a keyboard. This is in today's Elizabethton Star:

Editor:

The sole reason for spin and propaganda is to distort and distract. That it's used by elected politicians to bend public will as they transact the nation's business diminishes them.

Representative Roe's speechwriters do him no service by filling his press releases with provocative, misleading language. The latest added this new spin to the already hackneyed.

The notion of "...restoring patient-centric healthcare" sounds marvelous until it occurs to us that we've never had patient-centric healthcare to restore. Except for actual patient-centric Medicare and other government-run systems, including the taxpayer-funded congressional perk, what we have is a for-profit healthcare system which is by its very definition profit-centric. Anyone not able to add profitability is excluded. Constraints of insurmountable cost and other insurance tactics, currently leave 50 million of us uninsured. That's a shocking one-sixth of our nation. That's an astonishing 115,000 real people per each House member.

Dr. Roe, surely, through his progression, knows the cost to us of profit-centric, profit-driven private health insurance. Premiums have doubled every 10 years for decades. It abuses individuals and small businesses. It's responsible for a pervading sense of unease. It wrecks family's budgets. It bankrupts people because of illness. It limits lifework choices and the pursuit of dreams. Its inaccessibility causes suffering and kills real people.

The Democrats, except for the passage of Medicare, failed to reform healthcare historically because of fierce, propaganda-based opposition from Dr. Roe's party, always allied with an entrenched for-profit healthcare industry. And now we're in trouble. The way we've been obliged to do healthcare is unsustainable. The new law represents real progress.

We need Congress to grow up, drop the spin, ignore the honeyed moneyed voices of a parasitic industry, face reality and solve this.

A big perk for congressmen and senators is a very generous health insurance package, all paid by us taxpayers. Sadly, many millions of those required to pay those taxes for the benefit of our legislators can’t afford to buy health insurance for themselves and their families or are being denied care by a predatory health insurance industry interested only in profits.

At this moment, the Republican members of the House, comfortable in their own guarantees of excellent health care, are setting the stage to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would make health care available to almost all the 50 million currently without insurance.

How, in good conscience, can they do this when they themselves are so well taken care of? If that’s not hypocrisy, maybe they can provide another name. Until they figure out how to fix this mess to suit them, those among them who believe their own words will buy their own insurance.

Maybe the fact that the health insurance industry is a primary contributor to their political campaigns explains how they can ignore real needs of real people in real time. If it takes being wealthy and well-connected to merit their attention, why can’t they just say it instead of pretending that something good will eventually trickle down from protecting big insurance?

I’d like to see Rep. Roe step forward and do the right thing. He likes to talk endlessly about the politics of it all, but so far I haven’t heard him address the insecurities and suffering inflicted by an abusive, for-profit driven health care industry. We’ve listened and read his words for two years now, and it’s not enough.